Iain Searle

Biography

Our research in plant and animal epigenetics has been driven by a strong interest in understanding and elucidating the molecular mechanisms of how plants and animals adapt to environmental signalling and how speciation barriers evolve in plants. Epigenetics, broadly defined, refers to all genetic information not encoded in the DNA sequence, with the best-understood consequence of epigenetic modifications being the regulation of gene expression. Although gene transcription and protein synthesis is required for plant development, the full repertoire of epigenetic mechanisms underpinning biological adaptation and speciation barriers remain equivocal. Post-translational modification of histone proteins (i.e. acetylation, ubiquitination, etc) and the covalent modification of DNA (i.e. adenine methylation, cytosine methylation and other recently discovered marks) can influence the function of the genome in a myriad of ways, for example regulation of alternative splicing. In addition, the majority of the genome is pervasively transcribed such that more than 90% of transcriptional activity is related to the production of various long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA), which possess no or limited protein-coding capacity. Expansion of these transcriptionally active non-coding sequences in plant and animal genomes appears to have occurred primarily in higher multicellular organisms. Furthermore, emerging evidence from our laboratory and others that RNA modifications play an important role in extending the transcriptional space. Thus, both RNA modifications and lncRNAs represent attractive candidates for achieving context- and stimulus-specific epigenetic regulation of gene expression.

Research Interest

Medicine,Medical Education,Research,etc